Utopias of Mastermind

ABSTRACT. Poe was trying to find solutions to baffling problems of reality, be they the cosmic large infinity, the social medium infinity, the atomic small infinity, or the human psychological interior infinity. He delighted in mapping labyrinths of any problematic world – be they the worlds of reason or those of the imagination. At the frontier between fact and fiction, his dream was to devise increasingly cleverer narratives through which the ingenuity of mankind should be brought to light as a medium that could create solutions for the most baffling of questions. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a detective story so mysterious as to forbid any imaginable solution, he managed to fully detail his general method for the particular case of the detective story focusing on the dilemmas around the discovery of a murderer: only a mastermind can have the power to find answers to such impossible issues, but only if it can reconstruct a lost reality by using the most seemingly insignificant details extant in the present, and provided it is able – at least for a few necessary moments – to project itself empathically into the perpetrator’s mind. In the last analysis, this means that the detective must simulate in himself the operations of darkness. Apparently, Poe was a master in unveiling both the operations occurring in an evil mind, as well as those taking place in the brilliant mind of a detective. All of these Poe forged into his uniquely powerful and haunting narratives. pp. 9–11

Keywords: The Murders in the Rue Morgue; declaration of darkness; labyrinth